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Whether halving the population would help to reduce the production of man-made CO2 and other greenhouse gases is open to doubt. We contribute about 20,000 megatonnes per year. Even if 3.5 billion bodies needed to be cremated to stop the spread of a viral pandemic, this would only add an extra one hundred megatonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere, far short of our current annual contribution.

Vancouver City Council voted unanimously Wednesday night to declare a climate emergency. The motion was introduced by OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle. Now that the motion has passed, city staff will come up with new ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and set new climate change targets. Boyle says her motion passing unanimously proves how important it is to be a greener city.

Despite some positive climate action, new fossil fuel infrastructure is still being built and deployed. Dozens of new coal power plants are currently planned or under construction, for instance, while petrol car sales will nearly hit 100m in 2019.

At a time when the science of global warming is under attack and many people complain of climate change fatigue, some cheering news occurred last month: A book about climate change became a New York Times bestseller in its first week of publication. Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by environmentalist Paul Hawken, is the first environmental book to make such a splashy debut since Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe in 2006.

Key Democratic lawmakers say the Trump administration is putting U.S. armed forces at greater risk by not properly acknowledging and preparing for the effects of climate change. A law Congress passed in 2017 reauthorizing Department of Defense programs mandates the Pentagon spell out how rising sea levels, intensifying wildfires and other risks posed by a warming planet threaten to military installations.

A few blocks down the street from the White House, two dated 1970s office buildings are being combined and renovated into a space that will cut energy use and emissions by more than half. Soon, around half of the existing buildings in the city will also need to make changes under a new law.

For all those that rely on that cup of coffee to get you going in the morning, here’s another eye-opener: A majority of wild coffee might be going extinct. That info is courtesy of a new study finding roughly 60 percent of wild coffee species are at risk of going extinct. We don’t drink these wild, unsavory strains often, but they could help our beloved arabica and robusta beans adapt to climate change, resist pests and ward off diseases.

Climate change could be kept in check if a phaseout of all fossil fuel infrastructure were to begin immediately, according to research. It shows that meeting the internationally agreed aspiration of keeping global warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is still possible. The scientists say it is therefore the choices being made by global society, not physics, which is the obstacle to meeting the goal.

The fall lasts long enough that I have time to watch the blue ice race upward, aeons of time compressed into glacial ice, flashing by in fractions of seconds. I assume I’ve fallen far enough that I’ve pulled my climbing partner, Sean, into the crevasse with me. This is what it’s like to die in the mountains, a voice in my head tells me. Just as my mind completes that thought, the rope wrenches my climbing harness up. I bounce languidly up and down as the dynamic physics inherent in the rope play themselves out. Somehow Sean has checked my fall while still on the surface of the glacier.

More Americans are taking climate change seriously. A new report by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reveals that 8 percent of participants in three separate surveys said they had changed their mind on the topic over the previous year—and of those, 84 percent said their level of concern had increased. While this shift cut across party lines, many conservatives remain resistant to acknowledge the reality of the phenomenon, and its potentially catastrophic consequences.

Imagine during the Cold War that one political party, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Soviet Union was engaged in espionage against the United States, had a nuclear arsenal pointed at the United States, kept Eastern Europe under its thumb and imprisoned dissenters, refused to consider the Soviet Union a danger — of any sort — to the United States or other Western democracies. And they would offer no credible evidence to the contrary, but rather assert that it was all a hoax.

Dahr Jamail, staff writer at Truthout, has been writing about the global emergency of climate change for nearly a decade. In his new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Destruction, which is being released today, Jamail shares his firsthand accounts of returning to beloved spaces in the natural world. He observes the drastic ways in which they’ve been destroyed due to humanity’s relentless burning of fossil fuels, and mourns over how many of them are unlikely to recover over the duration of human existence.

Late last year, ‘yellow vest’ protests erupted across France. One trigger was a planned hike in the price of petrol. Fuel-tax rises, now on hold, are part of France’s strategy to reduce carbon emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2030 and phase out petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040. Clearly, public opposition might hinder these efforts.

Is there any hope on climate change, or are we just screwed? I hear this question all the time. When people find out what I do for a living, it is generally the first thing they ask. I never have a straightforward or satisfying answer, so I usually dodge it, but in recent years it has come up more and more often. So let’s tackle it head on. In this post, I will lay out the case for pessimism and the case for (cautious) optimism, pivoting off a new series of papers from leading climate economists.

Driving beyond South Africa's Limpopo province, into the village of Chivadini, people and grassland are scarce. But the oldest living organisms in Africa -- baobab trees -- are abundant. These spectral behemoths blend into the Saharan countryside and have been an icon of the African savannah since millennia. As the oldest seed producing trees in the world, their resilience -- some are more than 2,000 years old -- have earned them many names in myths, legends and folklore.

At 15, Greta Thunberg has many decades of living with the effects of climate change ahead of her—and she doesn't want to tell her grandchildren she didn't try to stop it. At an address to the United Nations COP24 conference in Poland last week, the Swedish activist accused world leaders of stealing the future of her generation and said they weren't mature enough to act, CNN reports. "You say you love your children above all else and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes," she told the conference, which was attended by delegates from 190 countries.

Despite federal climate policy rollbacks, governors and cities have decided to take up the mantel on climate leadership. Nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic governors and the mayor of Washington, D.C. announced that they will move forward with a plan that prioritizes clean transportation and ambitious climate goals.

Democrats put climate change back on the forefront of their governing agenda Thursday, portraying the issue as an "existential threat" even as the caucus remains split over how forcefully to respond. Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought up the issue in her opening address while touting a new select panel to come up with ideas on how to solve it, and the Energy and Commerce Committee announced that climate change would be the subject of its very first hearing this year.

Late last year, the Trump administration released the latest national climate assessment on Black Friday in what many assumed was an attempt to bury the document. If that was the plan, it backfired, and the assessment wound up earning more coverage than it probably would have otherwise. But much of that coverage perpetuated a decades-old practice, one that has been weaponized by the fossil fuel industry: false equivalence.

A team of Chinese and U.S. scientists estimated that the world’s oceans are warming by up to 40% faster than previously thought. The oceans are warming faster than previously estimated, setting a new temperature record in 2018 in a trend that is causing major damage to marine life, a Science article published Thursday warns. "How fast are the oceans warming?" was the main question addressed by a team of Chinese and U.S. scientists in a research which demonstrates that "global warming is here and has major consequences already. There is no doubt, none!"

Bill Gates said it would be unfortunate to see the U.S. miss out on the economic opportunity related to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, is among the world's most prominent climate advocates, in addition to his work around the world preventing infectious diseases. He shared some of his thoughts on global warming in an interview that aired Sunday on Axios on HBO.

What do scientists see when comparing our future climate with the past? In less than 200 years, humans have reversed a multimillion-year cooling trend, new research suggests. If global warming continues unchecked, Earth in 2030 could resemble its former self from 3 million years ago, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has dropped its support for coal. The World Bank signaled an intent to pivot away from coal in 2013 but continued work on a project in Kosovo that was only recently shelved. Like most major European nations, the EBRD’s new energy strategy also includes ample investment in natural gas plants as an alternative to delivering large, centralized power generation capacity. It’s support for gas, however, will only happen “where it is consistent with a low-carbon transition that is both secure and affordable”.

A photo from the tragic "Camp Fire," the most destructive wildfire in California history, shows a house burned down to its foundation. Such images are difficult to process, particularly with 86 people dead. The image got me thinking about what archaeological research can tell us about about disasters and climate change. As an archaeologist, I seek to answer questions about the choices we make, and the things we own and love.

Humankind is a runaway project. With a world population of more than 7.3 billion, we are a Malthusian plague species. This is not a condemnation or indictment, nor some kind of ironic boast. It is an observable fact. The evidence is now overwhelming that we stand at a crossroads of history and of natural history, of nature and our own nature.